ABSTRACT
How might we fashion a new imaginary for educational theory that both embraces and extends postmodernism’s gifts of perspectival knowledge, fragmentary subjects, and language insufficiencies? Some scholars, are yielding towards an approach to the educational project that takes an affective turn—where affect is clearly not understood as externalised from intellect and intellectualisation, but, rather, is at once inclusive and a collective hope. Amongst the diverse trajectories for thinking about affect, those inflected by readings of Spinoza appear to have the potential to contribute to educational theory. Spinoza enlarges our understanding of the postmodernism subject, whose identity is never fully constituted, by naming identity’s in-between-ess as the place where affect resides. In operationalising the lack or gap at the heart of identity, this place becomes one of both momentary and sustained forces of invited (or refused) encounters, sensations and sensibilities, where ‘between two thoughts all kinds of affects play their game; but their motions are too fast, therefore we fail to recognise them’ (Nietzsche, 1968, p. 263). It is in this same place that affect has an immanent capacity for responding to and extending the educational project.
